Just to add grist for the mill, I'd point out that people now are, perhaps erroneously, calling recorded program material for your stereo and your TV 'software' as well. Now, I would call a CD or a CDROM firmware, since you can't really change it, but who's splitting hairs . . . Years ago, people predicted that it would become increasingly difficult to distinguish hardware from software, though I doubt that. After all, if you can see it or touch it, it's hardware, right? Now we have software for building hardware. Not just the HDL's of various sorts, but one can actually realize a series of 'C' statements via VHDL or Verilog, among others, I'm sure, in a hardware (?) implementation. If we call the content of ROM and PROM devices firmware, it's reasonable to call the content of PAL and CPLD devices firmware as well, isn't it? What about the content of those volatile FPGA devices? They're not like PROMs, in that they forget what they learned last time power was on. They can be changed pretty readily. Some are even capable of running (yecchh!) self-modifying code <shudder> internally. What do we call all this "stuff" now? Dick -----Original Message----- From: John Ruschmeyer &lt;jruschme(a)hiway1.exit109.com&gt; To: Discussion re-collecting of classic computers &lt;classiccmp(a)u.washington.edu&gt; Date: Wednesday, August 18, 1999 12:34 PM Subject: Re: Article on old software programs (for IBM, Apple, Borland, etc) hardware". program?"